Image by websuccessdiva

We all need to find the best possible image for our next big Blog post, but this is often easier said than done.  I has  a brainwave earlier today, something that thousands of bloggers have been doing for years, nearly since time began.  So, what is this brain wave?  It’s simple.  Flickr.

This is not fool-proof.  There are certain obligations that you have to make, for example you need to watch the copyright.  But Flickr certainly does make these things easy to manage.

Copyright

Where ever you get your images from, copyright is a huge issue on the web.  It doesn’t matter if you steal a photograph from an Australian photographer or and English photographer.  Either way they can find your website as easily as you found there picture, and when they do they will kick up a fuss when they find out that you have been stealing their photo’s.

In order to get around the issue of copyright we must use the Flickr copyright system.  This is called Creative Commons.  The Creative Commons section of the Flickr website explains all of the different copyright categories of the various images, as well as allowing you to search in each individual category.  I won’t bother explaining all of these here because the guys over at Flickr really have done a good job as making everything clear.

Searching Flickr

For all example here I will be using the Attribution License category.  Go ahead and click the “See More” link.  The page that you have just opened only shows content that belongs in the Attribution License category.  This allows you to search this category for more images.

Think about the subject that you are writing about.  Just one or two keywords will do.  Search for them.  You will be surprised at how quickly you can find appropriate images for your blog postings.

Summery

All in all I think that once you know how to use Flickr it is the best image source at any bloggers disposal.  It is a quick, easy and copyright safe way of finding images.  If you stick to the Attribution License just make sure that you give credit and link back to the user profile that you took the image from and you will be fine.

Why didn’t I discover this sooner?

• Created our profile page templates
• Added custom fields
• Installed the correct plug-ins for the basic settings
• Hidden un-used fields.

If you have missed any of the days, or wan to recapp, you should read the following posts:

• Part One: Creating the Profile pages
• Part Two: Adding Custom Fields
• Part Three: Listing the users, and optimisation

So, we know where we left off, but what are we going to cover?  Today we will try to streamline and optimise the whole process, creating a minimal maintenance set-up.  In order to do this we will:

• Change the URL of the profiles
• List all of the users on one page
• Hide the Dashboard
• Have an auto-mated email send to new members
• Generate profiles for people who have not posted
• Get more control over what users can do
• Track what users do

Change the URL of user profiles

Changing the URL of the author profiles is a very easy job, one which will take us only a few seconds.  Simply download and install the Customer Author Permalink plug-in from the Wordpress repository.  Once you have done this go to Settings –> Author Permalink and change the Permalink to whatever you like.  If you were to change the permalink to member as I have the admin profile would then be located at [yoururl]/member/admin.

The Custom Author Permalink Settings Page

List Authors on a Page

It does seem a little pointless having gone to all of this work if we are not going list all of the member on one page and then link to their profiles.  Don’t forget that only users that have posted a post on the Blog and made a page will appear, but don’t worry we will solve this problem later on.  The first thing we need to do is create the file, in order to do this make a copy of page.php from your theme folder and add the following right at the top of the file.

/*
Template Name: List of Authors
*/
?>

This simply declares the file as being a custom page template called “List of Authors”, giving us the ability to create a page using this template that will list all of our authors. For the next stage I have added two separate code snippets below. Simply add the second snippet just before the first, the first should already exist in your new file as a line of code.






Now save this file as authorslist.php in your theme folder. You can now login to your Wordpress control panel and add a new page, using this newly created page template. In order to do so navigate to the new-page panel and then select the template as shown below from inside the “Attributes” box.

Selecting our new authors template

Role Manager

Role Manager is another good plug-in to play around with if you are going to allow members of the public to create an account with your website.  This plug-in will allow you to customise what the users can do.  It allows to to take away and add user levels, each with it’s own unique abilities to do various things.  On top of this it will also allow you to customise the settings for individual users.

Show Authors Without Posts

In order to show all users, you will need to install the “Show Authors Without Posts” plug-in. This plug-in is not intend for quite the job that we are going to use it for, so once you have installed it you will need to change the default role for new member to author, and then use the Role Manager plug-in (detail below) in order to change what an author can do.

Audit Trail

Audit Trial is a very useful plug-in for some people, it will track exactly what every logged in user does and when they do it allowing the administrator to trace every move of the logged in users.

Audit Trail is a plugin to keep track of what is going on inside your blog. It does this by recording certain actions (such as who logged in and when) and storing this information in the form of a log. Not only that but it records the full contents of posts (and pages) and allows you to restore a post to a previous version at any time.

To summarize:

• Log of user actions inside your blog – useful for finding out who did what in a multi-user system
• Post/page revisions and restorations – every change to a post or page is recorded and can be instantly restored to a previous version
• Differences are shown graphically
• Extensible, allowing other plugins the ability to add and display items in the Audit Trail
• Ability to track registered user page visits
• Fully localized

Conclusion

Now, you should have a fully functioning Wordpress powered user directory.  This is all good, but you are now building you own online community, and so there are a few things you should consider.  For example, how are you going to back-up your database?  You lose that and you have lost your entire community.  You should should also monitor the activity of other all users.  You need to know which pages are the most popular, so you need a statistics plug-in like the one I reviewed the other day.

Further, what about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).  How are you going to publicise you directory?  How are you going to develop it?  These are all important thing to consider.

If you need any help or support with anything in here please feel free to comment below and I will do my best to get back to you as quickly as possible.

This tutorial will be over multiple parts (that’s right, it’s our first series). The different parts are detail below.

• Part One: Creating the Profile pages
• Part Two: Adding Custom Fields
• Part Three: Listing the users, and optimisation

So, what additional fields will we be adding?  I think that their is quite a lot missing so, we will add those listed below:

• Twitter
• Linked In
• Website Name (we’ll turn this into a link)
• A Profile Picture
• Posts they have written on the website

On top of this we will also make any field that the user has not filled out hide themselves by default, this will make the profile page feel much more customized than it may otherwise feel.

Creating the custom fields

Now I have already talked you through doing this once already, but I will walk you through doing it with all of the above.

Now, you can navigate to Settings –> Register Plus in Wordpress in order to access the control panel for the plug-in.  You should now work through this page and customise the settings as you wish, the settings will change what the user can/has to do on the Wordpress sign-up page.

When you get to the “Add User Defined Fields” section you will need to be careful, the first input field should be the same as the name of the field all in lowercase, and the second should be the name of the field.  The name of the field can be whatever you like, but should be linked to what you expect the user to do with it, for example I added a custom field named “Twitter” where I wanted people to input there twitter user-names.  In the next box (the drop-down one) you can choose what type of field you want it to be.

So, now we will do one together.  We will start with Twitter, if you don’t already have a Twitter account I would suggest that you start by going over to Twitter and getting one for free.

To start navigate to the Register Plus page under Settings in your Wordpress control panel.  Now, scroll down to the User Defined Fields section, here you will see a sub-section labelled Custom Field, in the first box type “twitter” all in lower-case, and in the second box type “Twitter Username”.  After this make sure “Text Field” is selected in the drop-down box and then tick the “Add Registration Field” and “Add Profile Field” boxes.  Finally scroll box to the bottom of the page and click “Save Changes”.  That’s it, you have created you first custom field.  The custom fields should now look something like this.

What your "Twitter" custom field should look like

Now try to repeat this process for the other fields, using the credentials shown in the picture below.  For now we will skips the recent posts and profile picture sections as they are done differently.  In order to add more fields you need to click the little green plus icon by the field that you have already created.

What your custom fields should look like

Adding your custom fields to the template

Now, like yesterday this isn’t as bad as people think it is going to be.  Open author.php again in your text editor and get ready to begin editing it.  We’ll start by adding the users twitter user-name, and linking it to the users twitter profile underneath the email address.  To do this add the following code, you should know where by now.

You’ll notice now that it is exactly the same what we were adding before, except we replace the code between the quotes with the variable we declared in the first box back in the control panels for the Register Plus plug-in. So, how do we turn this into a link? Well, we link to twitter.com/ and then the twitter user-name, just I have below.

OK, twitter done, lets make the name of the user’s website into a link.

And then add a new bullet-point for there linked-in profile.

Showing Author Posts

This bit, will be really quite easy. Go to your server and open archive.php, and then copy everything between:

and

Now, paste it between the same two line sin author.php, and your done.

Making Things Vanish

So, this is all good and that, but what if someone doesn’t want to fill out a field? Well, we need to make it vanish. For this section I am going to go through and edit the entire block of code in one go, and then I will explain what I did in a moment.

$curauth = $wp_query->get_queried_object();

?>

ID, ‘nickname’); ?>

ID, ‘websiteName’); ?>) == ”) {?>
• Website: ID, ‘websiteName’); ?>

ID, ‘user_email’) == ”) {?>

• Email: ID, ‘user_email’); ?>

ID, ‘twitter’) == ”) {?>

• Twitter: @ID, ‘twitter’);?>

ID, ‘linkedin’) == ”) {?>

• Linked-in: ID, ‘linkedin’); ?>
  ID, ‘aim’) == ”) {?>
• AIM: ID, ‘aim’); ?>

ID, ‘yim’) == ”) {?>

• Yahoo: ID, ‘yim’); ?>

ID, ‘jabber’) == ”) {?>

• Google Talk/Jabber: ID, ‘jabber’); ?>

ID, ‘description’) == ”) {?>

• About: ID, ‘description’); ?>

So, what did I do here? Well, it’s simple really. Before every bullet-point I added a PHP if statement, so in simple terms this is what the description one is saying:

If there is a user description, display this code, otherwise don’t.

So, what does mine look like? Well, that what the picture below is of. Take a look, your should be pretty similar at this time, but style to look like your theme.

The finished article

Conclusion

Now you should have a fully working Wordpress profile page, but how you access it? Simple, go to [yourwordpressurl]/author/[yourusername], and that should land you on your profile page. If you need any help at all with this tutorial, or Wordpress in general post a comment below and I will get back to you ASAP.

Tomorrow we will be looking at how to optimise the whole user profile, as with the default settings every user has to have made a post to get a profile page. That is just the start of what we will be looking at though, as I have a lot more lined up as well including controlling what members can do and tracking what they do.

This tutorial will be over multiple parts (thats right, it’s our first series). The different parts are detail below.

• Part One: Creating the Profile pages
• Part Two: Adding Custom Fields
• Part Three: Listing the users, and optimization

What You Will Need

I could go on all day with plug-ins that will help to optimize this process, but I am going to start with the bare minimum, and then we will build on these over the next few days as we optimize the whole directory into a much more streamlined system.  We will start by building the system off just one plug-in, and then work from there.

So, I guess you want to know what plug-in this is?  The plug-in is called Register Plus.  What does Register Plus do?  It is a plug-in that will simply enable us to customize the registration process in Wordpress.

Additionally, I would advise that you make sure that you are happy with your current Wordpress theme as we will have to edit the core files, but DON’T PANIC!  It’s not as bad as it sounds…. I promise.  Any theme will do, you should still be able to follow the steps here without any problems.

The (really) easy bit

As I say, this bit is really quite easy, so I’m not going to go into much detail here, if you need any extra help just leave a comment below and I will get back to you.  For this bit you need to install the Register Plus plug-in from the Wordpress plug-in repository and ensure you have the theme that you wish to use installed and activated.

Now, you can navigate to Settings –> Register Plus in Wordpress in order to access the control panel for the plugin.  You should now work through this page and customize the settings as you wish, the settings will change what the user can/has to do on the Wordpress sign-up page.

When you get to the “Add User Defined Fields” section you will need to be careful, the first input field should be the same as the name of the field all in lowercase, and the second should be the name of the field.  The name of the field can be whatever you like, but should be linked to what you expect the user to do with it, for example I added a custom field named “Twitter” where I wanted people to input there twitter user-names.  In the next box (the drop-down one) you can choose what type of field you want it to be.

The "Twitter" custom field that I added

Finally you should tick “Add Registration Field” if you want it to appear on the registration page when people register, “Add Profile Field” if you want it to appear on their profile page in the Wordpress back-end and Required if you want to have to fill-out the field.

If you want to add more custom fields, click the little plus at the end of the line, then scroll down to the bottom of the page and hit save.

Editing Author.php

This is where the fun begins.  You now need to login to your server via FTP, and then navigate to “[wordpress_root]/wp-content/themes/[your_theme]“.  Now some of you might have a file named author.php, if you do sorry but I cannot write a tutorial especially for you because they are all different.  So, for you there are two options, delete it and follow this guide or read this guide and try to work out what you can edit via trail and error.  If you need nay help, again just post a comment below.

For the rest of you duplicate the file in your theme called archive.php and rename the new copy to author.php.  Now, open it in a text editor. The first thing that we need to do is remove the mark-up that is not needed from the file, you should three lines of code that look like those below, but note that it is common to find the first two of these lines on one line.

<?php if (have_posts()) : >
<?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); >
<?php endwhile; else: >

The first thing that you will need to do is delete everything between line one and two and then everything between lines 2 and 3, so the three lines look like the above, do not delete anything outside of these lines as it may effect your theme.

Now you need to add the following lines of php to the file between line one and two from the above php.


<?php

?>


If I’m honest I believe that that was the hardest part. Now, we are going to put all of the user data we can into a list on the page, once finished you can go through and delete any information that you don’t want. Now, we need to create a bullet-pointed list, and then add our data. In order to do this add the following directly after the php you just added before. On top of this we will set the user nickname to the title of the page. This assumes that your page titles for you theme are level 2 headings.


<h2></h2>
<ul>
<li></li>
</ul>


Now we will add (yet more) php that will make a call the user database and pull out the pieces of information that we request. The first field that I will add is the page title, to do this we will edit the code that we just added.


<h2><?php echo $curauth->nickname; ?></h2>
<ul>
<li></li>
</ul>


So, what did that bit of markup do? Well, it makes a call to the variable ($curauth) that we declared in the first piece of php we added, which has already fetched an array of all of the user data from the database, we then simply pulled out the correct piece of information. the word “echo” simply tells the php to put the nickname into the html, allowing the browser to render the page normally. Now, in a list we will add the other variables.


<li>Website: <?php echo get_usermeta($curauth->ID, 'user_url'); ?></li>
<li>Email:<?php echo get_usermeta($curauth->ID, 'email'); ?></li>
<li>AIM: <?php echo get_usermeta($curauth->ID, 'aim'); ?></li>
<li>Yahoo: <?php echo get_usermeta($curauth->ID, 'yim'); ?></li>
<li>Google Talk/Jabber: <?php echo get_usermeta($curauth->ID, 'jabber'); ?></li>
<li>About: <?php echo get_usermeta($curauth->ID, 'description'); ?></li>


So, what should you have far? Well it should look something like the screenshot below, but of course it will appear blank where information is not filled out in their profile (we’ll fix that later).

Your profile so far

And your code so far:


<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

<?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<?php endwhile; else: ?>


Now, don’t forget that you should still have other HTML and PHP around this which will control what your theme.

Now, that wasn’t too bad… was it? Feel free to leave comments if you need any help or support.

Before anyone can do anything with Wordpress, they need to be able to install it.  Weather it be on a local server or on a live server it has to be installed.  In this tutorial I will explain how to install wordpress from scratch.  Before you can precede with this tutorial you will require:

1. A working web server
2. An FTP account
3. A MySQL database

Step 1: Downloading and Uploading

The first that you will need to do is visit the Wordpress website where you will need to click the download link on the homepage.  This will take you to the Wordpress download page, here you need to click the large blue link on the right-hand side of the page, this will initiate the Wordpress download. Once the download is complete you need to extract the files.

If you are installing wordpress on your localhost, you can copy the wordpress folder to the location here you wish to install wordpress on your server and then skip to step two.

The rest of you, and no-doubt the majority of you, will now need to upload Wordpress to your server.  For those of you who do not have any hosting yet you can get some free hosting over at byethost.

In order to upload your website to your servers you will require and FTP client like FileZilla.  Once you have installed an FTP client you will need to input your FTP details so that it can connect to your host.

In order to do this in FileZilla you will need to go to File –> Site Manager, then click “New Site” and fill-out the form that you are presented with, finally click “Connect” to connect to your FTP server.

The FileZilla site manager

Once you have connected to your FTP server copy the contents of the “Wordpress” folder that was in the ZIP folder onto the server, in the location where you would like to install wordpress.  In order to do this in FileZilla, navigate to the location where you would like to install wordpress and in the left pain navigate to the location where you extract the wordpress ZIP folder.  Now click-and-drag the contents of the ZIP folder on the right-panel.

Step 2: Running the Install

You will now need to navigation to the location where you installed wordpress.  For those of you who have a byethost account this will probably be username.byethost.com.

Once you navigated to this page you should be presented with a screen that looks like the one below.

The first screen that should be seen when installing wordpress

On this screen simply click “Create a Configuration File” to proceed.  The next screen will explain to you what you are going to do when installing wordpress.  Read the screen and then click “Lets Go!”.

Now, it’s time to insert your Wordpress database settings, you should be able to get these from the screen where you set-up your database with your host, if you cannot find these instructions contact your web host and they should be able to provide with assistance in finding them.

The Wordpress install screen where you configure your database settings

Now, click “Submit”.  If the screen returns and error go back and check your settings.   Otherwise, you will  proceed onto a screen that will confirm that you have successfully connected wordpress with your database.  If you get this screen click the “Run the Install” button.

On the next screen you will need to choose a name for your Wordpress website.  Enter the name into the appropriate box and then insert an email address, this will be associated with the main admin account, and if you forget your password it will be emailed to this address.

If you want your website to appear on search engines, tick the box labeled “Allow my blog to appear in search….” and then click “Install Wordpress”.

The screen that allows you to choose a name for your new Wordpress website

On the next screen you will be presented with your username (admin) and a randomly generated password, note this password carefully before clicking “Log In”.

The final screen shows you your username and password

Now for those of you who didn’t write down your password correctly, check your email.  Assuming that your host allows “php send mail” then you should shortly receive an email with your password in.

The final thing you now need to do is login, you should be presented with a screen like this the one below.

The default wordpress logon screen

Conclusion

I hope this tutorial helps somebody install wordpress successfully on there server.  If you need any help, just give me a shout by leaving a comment and I will do my best to help you.

If you have any other comments, feedback or just want to share your thoughts on wordpress or this tutorial, feel free to leave a comment below.

Thank you for reading.